PHIL: One of the big debates that’s sort of out there today is about the propriety or impropriety of multi-site churches where they’ll use video to broadcast the pastor’s message to various locations in a community. And now even all around the United States. What are your thoughts about multi-site churches where one pastor teaches a group of churches by video?
JOHN: I don’t think there’s any place in the life of the church for a flat screen pastor, I really don’t. Look, if you’re going to be a pastor, what is required of you if you’re going to be a pastor? You go to 1 Timothy 3, you go to Titus 1, and it lays it out. Your life has to be above reproach. You have to have proven that you’re the leader of your family. You have to be hospitable. You have to be not given to anger. It gives you all those qualifications. How do you know anything about a flat-screen face three miles away from where you are? What kind of shepherding is that? What kind of pastor is that? That’s no pastor at all. That is not a pastor.
I’ve heard those kind of discussions. I’ve heard those debates. And I think it’s a sad day when people are being taught by someone about whom they know absolutely nothing. Now you can read a book by somebody you don’t know. You can listen to a radio program by somebody you don’t know. You can listen to a tape and all of that. But when you talk about the shepherd of your soul, this is somebody that has to be a part of your life, that you trust and you know and you’re in a community of people that have learned to love him and trust him and know his family. I think it’s a tragic thing. I think if you drove me to a kind of bottom line here, and you’ve been known to do that, I would say…I’m so glad for the revival for Reformed Theology. I’m so glad that there are lots of people that are getting in on Reformed Theology and talking about imputed righteousness and talking about justification. I’m really glad for all of that. I’m glad for a grasping of Reformed soteriology.
But, it is a terribly incomplete movement because they have such an abysmal understanding of ecclesiology, they don’t understand the church. Many of these mega places with these flat-screened kind of hi-tech rock concert places are anything but a church. They’re a repeated event. They’re typically a repeated youth event. It doesn’t have anything to do with the church. They’re not multi-generational. They don’t care for people from the cradle to the grave. They’re not pouring themselves into the lives of people, shepherding people. They’re talking about how much broader they can get rather than how much deeper they can get. How many more people can they touch superficially, not how many people can they touch personally and deeply. That’s not pastoring…that is not pastoring.
I’m deeply concerned about the sad state of ecclesiology. And I will just tell you, talking to our friend Al Mohler about this and he said, there are about four or five of these kinds of things that are very successful and all the rest of them are real small, sort of unsuccessful efforts at repeating this. That is not a biblical model for being a pastor. People need to be shepherded by the man that God puts into their life as their shepherd wherever they are and it doesn’t need to me living here, doing it somewhere else in America.
